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I huffed. “Siena. Siena Moretti.”
“Hmm,” he considered with a nod, looking to where she’d disappeared. “Quite a woman.”
“Don’t even think about it,” I warned.
He did a double take. “Wait. Moretti? As in Moretti Vineyards?”
“Don’t go there, bro.”
He chuckled, cupping his chin in his hand, massaging his jaw. “This is all starting to make a lot more sense.” His shit-eating grin was pissing me off.
“Fuck off.”
He laughed. “A little touchy, are we, big brother?”
“Shut up. Come on,” I said, leading him up the steps. I walked to the fridge, grabbed two beers.
“Man, this thing sucks,” he said from the couch, trying to get comfortable.
“Tell me about it.” I handed him a bottle. “Cheers.”
He clinked his bottle to mine. “Yeah. Thanks for the heartwarming welcome.”
I held the cold bottle to my throbbing eye. “No problem.”
His face was expressionless, waiting.
“I guess I should apologize. I just . . . well, you know how I get about Dad.”
“I thought you’d worked through all that shit. You keep everything to yourself, bottled up. But you said you were in a better place. Guess you’re not.”
“No, I am. It’s just this place . . . this situation . . . there’s more to it than just a simple purchase. And he doesn’t get it.”
“What doesn’t he get?”
It took over two hours to tell Matthew everything that had happened since coming here. About Sophia and Sal, meeting Siena, forging a relationship with them that wasn’t superficial and full of shit. About Pops’s heart attack. “I swear to God, if Walter had anything to do with it, I’ll fucking kill him. When I saw you, I thought maybeyouhad something to do with it too. Then you mentioned Dad. It just set me off.”
“I got in yesterday. If you’d bothered calling me back, you’d know that.”
“Why didn’t you text me to let me know?”
“I don’t know.” His shoulders rose and fell, making me remember that he was my little brother. That I was the older, supposed to be more mature, brother. “I guess I was just looking forward to seeing you.”
I immediately felt guilty. “Shit. I’m sorry.”
He shrugged, not replying.
The weight of everything came crashing down. How was I going to fix this clusterfuck of a mess? “Listen. There’s something I’ve been thinking about. I was thinking about . . . hoping to bring you on board . . . when I had them more refined. But, seeing as you’re here, now . . . might as well show you.”
“What is it?”
“Here. See what you think. It’s what we talked about years ago. I don’t even know if you remember.” I handed him the portfolio I’d been working on.
Four hours later, I was surprised to find how amenable Matthew was to everything. I thought he’d give me more pushback, but he shocked me with his open-mindedness and enthusiastic attitude about moving forward with my ideas. He’d even helped me fine tune things and pitched some of his own ideas, which added to what I’d already configured.
“We’re going to have to work our asses off to get all this shit in order. But I think we’ve got something here.”
“You do?” I asked.
